Posts made by Gilette

@thatguythere

Ooof. You're actually mistaking it for gentrification. As I said, you betray your own lack of in-depth understanding.

@salty-secrets

I can't believe I forgot to mention the LE stuff as an example. While it's certainly within the umbrella of my first dot point, that kind of behavior will have me drop a game immediately. It's a big part of the reason why I can't ever seriously think of going back to MCM. The whole LE thing reads out like some kind of weird farce when you lay it out.

I'd leave a game if I found out Elsa was on staff, too. But it's probably more accurate to say -- along with some of the other things I listed -- that I'd never join a game with those issues in the first place.

@ThatGuyThere

Then you betray a lack of understanding on the difference between real spaces and online spaces when it comes to that discussion. For better or worse, online spaces are not restricted by the typical elements -- things like geography or language or peer group association -- that do wonders to constrain ideological/cultural drift.

To use your analogy, no one has ever walked into a punk club and, over time, attracted more of their friends and turned the punk club into a hiphop club by inches and degrees simply because the punk club is the most popular one around.

Multiverse MUSH, to use an example as it has been discussed, is a distinct culture of 'possums' that fell prey to the exact issues described. To illustrate it, MCM was built around a neverending war between two Multiversal 'superfactions' set on and around a superplanet. You could app just about anything but you were expected to adjust for tone and the MCM 'world'.

MCM grew popular whereupon people were joining it because it was something like #6 on MUDStats and promoted a wide scope of playable concepts. These players had little interest in actually engaging with the wider theme and would frequently argue against being required or even expected to do so. This is because they were looking for an active RP location more than they were looking for what MCM was specifically (the same reason why Shang attracts such a wide and varied crowd who seem to also hate the game as a whole*).

While this tension had always been something of an issue (MLP theme), it eventually culminated in things like people making accusations of isolationist 'mini-MUs' among the playerbase and something of a coup from the headwiz. As best can be determined, the coup came down to the first Headwiz wanting the game to get back to its PvP factional roots and was willing to threaten to shut the whole thing down to do so. This resulted in some of the staff establishing a copy on the new, and current, server. This was all kept hush-hush until someone spilled the beans semi-recently, years after it happened.

• -- funnily enough, Shang's big loss of players event (changing the minimum character age) is much closer to the sort of behavior you're saying -- ideological drift over a long period by an increasing number of people due to changing norms (basically gentrification, really) -- as opposed to what is mentioned by that author in particular, which is people joining a community despite not actually caring about what makes it a community beyond a social space.

@sunny

No problem! It's a good article and the best way I've seen of explaining the issue that all online communities -- perhaps all communities -- inevitably face.

Oh, and when there are too many goddamn otters.

It's been a long time since I've really MU'd to the extent that I barely consider myself a part of the community I've adored for just about twenty years. Some of what I'm about to put down apply to the games I'd been on for years that I stopped playing over a year ago.

Presented in no particular order.

• Staff making unethical decisions. This can include staff lying to players.
• Staff not doing their jobs, from not creating RP to flat out not running the game. This is one reason why I left Coral Springs.
• Players being put in influential positions when they are not suited to it.
• General game setting breakdown. To name an example, I joined MCM and found most of my fun there with the PvP narrative. When people started to turn against that, I had much less impetus to play there. This may also include concept bloat.
• A certain amount of players who might not break rules but are just annoying. These are the sorts of people who dominate +pub channels with their day-to-day minutiae and never seem to actually RP.
• Similar to the above, people who sit in the OOC lounge and/or peanut gallery without RPing.
• Again, related. Whisper campaigns, directed at myself or others. A growing awareness of how common this was on MCM is a big reason why I left, particularly when one was apparently being run against me by a player who was otherwise polite and pleasant to me.
• A character of mine loses a friend, ally, enemy, lover, etc who I enjoyed playing with. The headache of trying to finangle an IC reason to explain an OOC absence is not worth it and I'll frequently get bored and drop the character.
• A lack of attention to spelling, grammar and general basic level of effort stuff among the playerbase. This is a textual medium and you should take pride in your words.
• An inability to run scenes, plots or characters with consequence. I like coffee chat RP but only because it allows you explore those consequences.

Really, it comes down to the fact that I'm joining a game to play a game. If I can no longer do that, I'll leave. I will put up with a lot if I can continue playing the game I joined to play. I will put up with a lot because I'm in the Australian timezone and that basically prevents you from engaging with most MUs at a convenient time.

The Expanse TV series is a fantastic adaptation. I'm a big fan of the books and the TV series is basically perfect.

It helps that they have the book writers heavily involved. And it helps that the book writers see it as a chance to sort of make the story a bit better, given the weird production hell the Expanse series has had. First it was going to be three books, then during the third book it was extended to four, then six, then during the fourth book it was extended to nine.

Also, the actor for Amos had read all the books prior to auditioning and basically came in and said "I want to be Amos". He's nailed the character so well. They all have, really.

The reason introductions suck is because a lot of people approach them as like interrogations.

"What's your name? How long have you been [around here/on this ship/doing this thing]? Where are you from?"

It's never natural.

@Lisse24

I'm only singling you out because you volunteered, and what I'm about to say is probably arising from never working a job where I could login somewhere.

Isn't this a problem? Whenever I log into somewhere and see a WHO list populated by people who've been idle for hours, days, maybe even weeks, I really do start to wonder why they're even online. To me, when I log in, I log in with a purpose: I want to RP very soon.

Couldn't this sort of breed a culture where the idea isn't logging in to play so much as it is just logging in out of habit?

@AlexRaymond -- I actually think it is that, that there are still a lot of people who might log in a bit every week but don't really play. And, in my mind, they don't qualify as active MUers.

edit: For example, I know a RP friend who logs into their charbit on a MU every few weeks for literally a minute, seemingly enough to keep it alive, but that's it. They've been doing this sort of pattern for like two years. Technically active, sure. But I also wonder why they do so, and why they've been doing it for so long.

@Apos

Interesting! It does feel a bit ridiculous to be saying 'shit's fucked' to the idea of there being a few thousand players around. Less so, however, when you factor in time zones, schedules, and the fact that I imagine the MU ecosystem is more like a series of independent habitats than something with permeable layers. I mean, we see it here on MSB. There's your WoD players, your Lords and Ladies, your comic-books, and so on.

For example, logging into any MU during my timezone evening, I would be lucky to find maybe 3-4 people who would be active and less so willing to scene.

However, it astounds me that MUs can have so many people on and so few people doing anything.

These days I get all my RP on Champions Online of all places. I think MUs in general could, and should, borrow from conventions of MMO RP more than continue trying to beat the dead horse of tabletop RP (after all, MMO RP is basically MU RP just with a shorter parser and some graphics that no one really considers). MUs are not tabletop games. Tabletop games are, typically, around half a dozen people who have some sort of friendship or connection. MUs are basically randoms trying to herd cats.

Make that as easy as possible.

Generally, my points are what @Rook said. Some of these are with the idea of having less players in mind, others are more general.

1. Narrow the RP. While it was alive, I thought Coral Springs was great for this. All characters were members of the same superpowered academy and everything was set around one seaside town. That's enough breadth to allow for just about any concept but enough limits that any other player could know how to interact with any other player.

2. A general pushback towards pick-up RP. On a lot of games, there's been an increasing penetration of +scenes code. That is, code that allows players to have access to a schedule that allows them to more easily signal when RP will be happening. A great idea, particularly when involving various timezones, but it often seems to lead to a 'one scene per day' culture. And a culture of people just not logging on if nothing is scheduled. If there is a big push to people becoming passive, I would put this right near the top of possible reasons.

3. Push people to go out and RP. The big reason why I RP on CO is that, well, I can log in, hit up the social hub and find 20-30 other people at any one time who are basically down to social RP. From social RP, I might form an OOC chemistry. From there, more detailed RP. Now, it's not necessarily high-quality RP, but that's okay -- and it leads into my next point...

4. Dispel the notion that 'more words = better than'. I would rather have a few quick lines to create a tense, exciting back-and-forth dynamic than waiting ten or fifteen minutes for two or three paragraphs. Something verbosity or detail is appreciated, but often it is meaningless. If people can only afford to log in for an hour or two, then there are ways to make it a good hour or two.

5. Active staff who model the above behaviors -- without thinking this makes them some kind of martyr. I'd say something like this is key to combatting the players who are lazy or entitled. Like it or not, staff are more than custodians of the server who keep the lights on.

6. Truly consider whether XP systems are necessary and beneficial to any particular game. As much as I like having some numbers and stats, there are plenty of games I've played on with XP which I've never ever spent. I think you need a simple system for conflict resolution and that's about it. I would be interested in seeing a MU run with something like the PDQ ruleset.

7. Actually utilise the unique aspects of the MU medium. Let players create things, let players affect the world. If people feel a sense of connection, they might be more inclined to stick around and do things. It's one thing to have Generic Bar and it's another to have Generic Bar where it says that my character is the local pool champion, y'know?

8. Consider reaching out to other communities to find players. This whole hobby needs a transfusion of new blood and it needed it years ago.

I think the key thing is that this hobby needs to find some way of modernizing itself. That doesn't mean reinventing the wheel but it sure as hell means acknowledging it exists. MU games are a unique art form but they're also basically 20-30 years old, designed in a world of different people, different technology and different expectations.

I don't think the MU community feels more passive. At least, not for no real reason.

I think the MU community is suffering from an increasingly low number of players. I would wager there are only a few hundred unique IPs left across all the major MUs.

I think your three ideas are great, @Rook. And not just because I said something similar a few months back!

@Chet said in POLL: Super Hero MU Gut Check:

The Jedi have always brought an interesting philosophical dilemma for me: is balance to the Force a null state, Jedi and Sith, or is balance to the Force someone that lives in both worlds, someone that can use darkness to redeem an evil man. I think Lucas never answers the question as a test that shouldn't be definitively answered; you're supposed to pick Sith at some times in your life, and your answer determines your friends.

Have you ever considered a Star Wars MUSH with a Jedi/Sith heavy world? You'd have to research the novels on the canon's antiquity, and discount the movie backgrounds, which would displease your more issue concerned, externally aware audience, but please the mystics among us that see art as an internal question.

I'm sure you could dig up the proper quotation from Obi-Wan Kenobi when he introduces the lightsaber to Luke to properly inspire it.

To stay on topic, to apply the spirituality of stages and internal questions to a comic book roleplaying game, you'd have to avoid the cheap route, the obviously magical characters, and go with more of an arcane setting, something like a World War 2 comic book setting with a Hellboy backdrop. That doesn't mean you need Hellboy as the draw. Something like a Marvel 1963 thing, with the mystical elements of each Allied, Axis, and Neutral power drawing on the various setting elements.

Gotta lol @ this. Let this be a reminder to everyone that if you're going to talk at length about things you really need to understand them. Your dilemma is a false one.

Lucas has actually flat out stated what balance to the Force is. It's all light-side, no Sith. Dark side is a cancer, it's always bad, and you don't say balance is having 'a little bit' of cancer. Until TFA was released, there was no 'light side' in any of the films. There was just 'The Force' and 'the dark side of the Force'.

The EU conception of things like Gray Jedi is just that, an EU thing. Usage of the dark side in the movies is about as simplistic as you can get: if you use this power, it turns you into a hateful old man and kills everything you know and love. Using the power of lightning summoned from your infinite hatred "at some times in your life" does not make anyone a brooding anti-hero. It's evil. SW mythology and morality is very simple.

Also, I'm just going to say that you shouldn't need to retrain from history to narrative as history is all about narratives.

He's our very own Tommy Wiseau.

@Chet said in POLL: Super Hero MU Gut Check:

I'm sorry if I went off on a tangent, I'm working on sharpening up a writing tactic for use in whatever little niche writing gig I can find,

Good Lord, I feel for whoever has to read your resume, draft, whatever.

Especially combined with:

@Chet said in POLL: Super Hero MU Gut Check:

I don't even know what it means in a literal term, it's just a term I hear bandied about, and in this context, it seemed properly British.

As someone with published work, dude... I don't know. There are no words.

seriously i need to know if i'm having a stroke that's affected my ability to read or what

@Chet said in POLL: Super Hero MU Gut Check:

The thing you have to remember about superheroes (I picked this up from reading a comic journalism book about the creation of Spider-Man, newsprint innards and all) is that they're written to appeal to bully personalities to trick them into poor tactics, and that supervillains are all written, in the comics, to appeal to bully victims, to give them various avoidances and escapes from the superheroes. Superdickery, the website sadly departed to us now, had all the top contenders for the writer jokes about the people they had heard about either a) trying to be superheroes, b) possible downfall routes for people that a character appealed to, or c) an in-joke about someone that a writer met that looked like a superhero.

For instance, I have chtirophobic conduct disorder RL, that's the Scarecrow, people that make sibilances (whistling, sing-songs, mutters) are sometimes sociopathic, and the chtirophobia (fear of birds) causes it to piss me off. So, I display sociopathic behavior to anyone that tries a sociopathic tactic. I avoided anything remotely resembling psychology in college, and although I got taken down by some Schulzstaffel types, I recovered by writing and going into the arts (I'm attending school for creative writing and fiction, Batman villains are written a certain way so they make you think about going into an authorship, media related, or artistic profession).

what

If someone is playing a canon character so poorly then it's a matter for staff, not you. Typically FC-heavy games have a clause somewhere in the rules that says, hey, if you portray a character poorly then we can take it away from you.

Is giving advice worth it? Hah! Does it ever work, online or otherwise?

@HelloProject

As a until recent MCM player, MCM actually ran into a serious problem with its PRPs and the plot application process. Essentially, a game of Chinese whispers meant that no one knew what they needed to submit or what scenes they could run without a plot application -- so, no one really ran anything.

But yeah, a few years ago, MCM seemed to have it down to a good process.

There had also been a few issues with staff approving plots and then, when the events transpired, claimed they hadn't approved it and basically demanded events to be retconned. Showing the approval emails didn't change things.

Which probably also affected things being run there, too.

@faraday said in Identifying Major Issues:

Or maybe it's because there's a sense of entitlement that expects staff to be their personal tabletop GM.

Imagine sitting down to play DnD with a GM, but all the GM does is give you a table to sit at. Maybe they give you a map and some dice. Maybe they give you a few miniatures.

But they don't actually run the game.

When you ask if they're going to do anything, they just shrug and indicate the other players and say, hey, make your own fun, you've got all the tools.

That's what it is when staff don't run things.

To put my teaching hat on for a moment, when you're running something, you need to explain the behaviors and then model them, and then correct the people who do it wrong. Staff don't really explain them beyond a series of help files, in my experience, and they certainly don't model it. Then, they don't correct anyone who acts like a dick or actively makes things worse.

Is it any surprise that people are paralysed and feel like they can't run things?

Not much to add at this time beyond wholesale agreement with @HelloProject's 1 and 3 points.

It feels like there's been a shift from staff as people who keep the game running smoothly to just people who keep the game running. People who are basically responsible for keeping the hardware online and preventing code from crashing things. It feels very rare to see staff drive the game in a direction or proactively discuss issues and/or discipline problem players.

At least with this one, I think one of the best things HellMOO had was a public bboard called Crime and Punishment. HellMOO was pretty liberal at handing out temp bans. If someone was just being a bit too much of a dick and not listening to staff? They get a day or two off. If they abused game systems? A week or two. Did they keep doing it? Longer. Did they actively try to bring the game down or make the game inhospitable to people? Don't come back.

A big part of this was a few points.

• Bans were not seen as permanent.
• Player culture understood bans as a disciplinary measure, not a 'stay the fuck out' measure.
• *cnp board kept things transparent: player name, what they did, logged evidence of it, duration of the ban and which staff member handled it.
• Staff had a vision and a drive and were quite involved in keeping things running smoothly, listening to concerns, implementing fixes and being as fair as possible. This led to respect, which generally prevented people from forming whineship groups if someone got punished. For example, if someone found an exploit and reported it, they might generally get to keep what they earned from it -- with a stern warning. But if it was found that you were exploiting and didn't report it, or shared it around? Well, then, you'd be looking at probably a day or two away.

Surprise surprise, most people played by the rules.

Running a game is more than keeping the server on.